A Setting for Imitation and Actuality:

There is a desk with a chair, a couch with coffee table, a reading lamp for the evenings.

Despite the horizontal wish for language, it still only descends vertically down the page.

The book Mimesis lies open on the coffee table, holding with it Auerbach’s lonely nights in Turkey, slightly buttered bread, one thin candlelight.

There is a mirror that reflects the markings of the body.

A collection of photographs of America aging line the ceiling.

The Romantics (the main aggressors) will imagine the marks as being self-inflicted.

The way blade marks across the ankle are beginning and ending lines, a definite existence of pain, even if short lived–the way the Romanics would appreciate and prefer something the length of a band-aid.

Even if just for an instance–for the experience they will say.

The markings themselves though (the audience will know) have been historically predetermined.

Each blood clotted bruise is built from the semiotic space where the reader/viewer has aged and accumulated in the same way that their facilitator has.

The markings in the mirror are counted and photographed, recorded and positioned opposite the mirror.

The mirror is used to reflect something that gives pleasure from its doubleness.